Have tried to model my potential complete 2020 season points expectations and targets, based on the good info shared here about both DR formulas and FIA points tables...
Having done most of the races so far, it's hard to move the needle without some really big improvements in the Stage 3 races, either in average finish or in DR.
In the process, checked to see what kind of 'luck' I've had with lobby assignments and door #'s during the FIA season. What do you know... I've averaged... wait for it: 10 (out of 20). 9 in the Manufacturers Series and 11 in the Nations Cup races! What do you know!? So fair play, PD... thank you! (gonna chart the correlation to Lobby Rank vs Finish to see how it looks, I wonder if there's a clear relationship, or whether the spread in lobbies is too small to result in that... suspect that's the case)
I have been able to increase my DR from around 20k at the start of the season to about 34k now. It's having an interesting impact on my scores. A 2nd place from Round 1 is now negated by a 12th place in Round 19! And if I continue on my current 'average' finish of 8th place, I will negate 6 or 7 more finishes if I run all 10 races in Stage 3! So the first half of the year was more or less pointless.
This assumes another key thing: that my average finishes remain the same, and that I increase my DR by the modeled amount each time I do that, which builds up the FIA points haul. But based on the models I've seen, an 8th place finish each week would results in an average DR bump of 400 per race. To be conservative, I only expected half that in my model, assuming I don't run them all, or it gets tougher to hold station as I slowly go up the DR ladder.
Throw in a win or two and it could get very interesting for me, in that regard. Would be cool to achieve an "S" rating in my first season and having only played the game for six months.
It's really interesting how this all plays out in the standings, though. Hard to predict what the rest of the field does (though I did make a table of the top 300 drivers to take a guess at it!), but this gives me an outside chance at "S" (top 140 in NA) in the Nations season... unless nearly everyone also improves their scores at the same rate (unlikely). There is currently about a 20-place window for me to get inside, where my top 8 races would yield a final standing in the Top 140 in NA.
It's also why I am parking this account except for FIA races, so that I can try to keep it on this path, and get all the FIA points that I can.
EDIT/UPDATED: There IS a pretty clear correlation to Door#/Ranking compared to my finishing results. Over the 20 places in the grid, there is a total variance of about 2 spots... in other words, I would expect to finish about 2 spots lower if door 20, than door 1, and relatively in between. It's similar in the Nations and Mfrs series both, so pretty interesting. Kind of 'feels' about right, given the usual spread of DR in an FIA lobby in NA.
It just seems so random in its nature... 
